by Robert Moss
‘Our job is to wipe them out before they disperse,’ Sasha concluded. ‘It is desirable, but not mandatory’ — he quoted the dispatch precisely — ‘to take Abdol Qari alive.’ This was the rebel leader who was believed responsible for the assassinations in Herat.
Zaytsev consulted the map again. ‘That area is totally exposed. There’s no possibility of surprise.’
‘You’re right. But it’s going to be hard for them to melt back into the mountains if we take them from the air.’ He drove his right fist into his left palm. ‘We’ll order up an air strike and then take the Caravan team in straight away by helicopter.’
‘What about the Iranians?’
Sasha shrugged. ‘Their air force has been rusting away since they kicked out the Shah. They need all the planes and pilots they’ve got left to fight the Iraqis. They won’t do anything except invoke the wrath of Allah. We’ll probably be in and out before they even know it.’
*
The Sukhoi fighter-bombers went in at dawn. The drone of the engines carried for miles across the desert, and by the time they reached Abdol Qari’s qarargah, the guerrillas were already starting to scatter in all directions, on horseback and in trucks and broken-down buses. They even had an old Russian-made tank that must have been captured in fighting across the border. Perhaps it was just for show, because it was abandoned as soon as the jets began their attack, swooping low to strafe the tents and the bearded figures in turbans and floppy woolen hats rolled up at the sides who were tumbling out of the trucks and scrambling to take cover. Some of the Mujahideen were trying to fight back, firing off RPG rockets. But their position was a perfect killing ground for the Soviets. The rebels must have thought themselves secure, so far inside the Iranian border; they would never have let themselves get caught in the open like this in Afghanistan.
Then the big helicopter gunships appeared, buzzing like hornets at the back of the fleeing horsemen. Sasha’s group jumped out right in the middle of the qarargah, where a few guerrillas were still holding out among the smoking rubble. The Estonian leaped from hut to hut, seemingly indestructible, cutting a swathe of death.
There was the crack of a rifle from inside a ruined hut, and the man at Sasha’s shoulder gasped and fell headlong.
He heard a shrill cry, ‘Allah-o-Akbarr and hurled himself into the hut, machine gun blazing.
He found a boy, barely older than Petya, trying to reload an old Lee-Enfield that was taller than he was. He had delicate, almost girlish features, and beautiful almond eyes.
‘Harakat!’ Sasha shouted at him, gesturing toward the entrance with his gun. ‘Move out.’ There was the remains of breakfast on the floor — flat, oily loaves of unleavened bread, a spilled bowl of yoghurt infested with flies.
‘Death to Russians!’ the boy spat at him. Sasha picked him up bodily and threw him out the door, wondering at the hatred that sustained these people from one generation to the next, and about how many Russians this child had killed.
Zaytsev came riding up on a horse he had stolen from the Afghans. He had several prisoners with him, including Abdol Qari. Sasha was surprised at the man’s youth. He looked about twenty-two, twenty-five at most. One of the Mujahideen captured with him, a villainous-looking fellow with a hooked beak of a nose like the yellow-chested vultures that were hovering above, could have been Qari’s grandfather. There was a terrible fatalism about Qari and the rest of them. They were prepared for death, for any torment of the flesh, if Allah willed it.
*
They flew back with the prisoners, over mountains whose hollows turned purple as the sun drained from them, to their base camp outside Herat. A Major Mahmoud of the Afghan secret police was already there waiting for them, quivering like a whippet in his eagerness to take charge of the interrogation of Abdol Qari.
‘There’s a blood feud between their families,’ the major’s KGB adviser whispered to Sasha.
‘You’re going to let the Afghan run the questioning?’ Sasha asked.
‘Why not? They know what to expect from each other. The bandits killed about half of Mahmoud’s office in Herat. The other half are probably reporting to the Mujahideen,’ he added cynically. ‘What a country.’
Sasha was aching with hunger and fatigue. He went to find Zaytsev and something to eat. They got hold of some excellent goat’s cheese and a couple of bars of chocolate, then ate beside an irrigation ditch on a hill overlooking the valley. The water in the canal tasted as clean and cold as melted snow. Sasha drank greedily. But the stream below them was unnaturally green, almost salad green. The army must have been using chemicals in the area, probably liquid poison to contaminate the wells.
‘Don’t spit into the well,’ he quoted the old proverb to Zaytsev. ‘You may have to drink from it later on.’
Zaytsev grunted and went on chewing steadily.
Sasha would have liked to go swimming, but the violent green, and the Afghan abhorrence of any degree of nudity, deterred him. On the far side of the stream, he could see peasants threshing corn the way they had done it from time immemorial, driving yoked oxen around in a tight circle, trampling the stalks with their hooves.
‘Do you think it’s worth it?’ he asked Zaytsev.
‘You mean the war? I don’t like any of these chernozhopi, and I don’t like what the war is doing to us. The men don’t understand it. They’re fed a pack of lies before they’re sent out. But you can’t live on lies out here. Is it true that they’re not sending all the bodies home, to try to disguise the number of casualties?’
‘It’s true,’ Sasha agreed.
‘We could put up with any number of casualties if the men believed in what they were doing.’
‘You mean if we believed the war could be won this way,’ Sasha corrected him.
Zaytsev didn’t dissent.
‘It can only end in one of two ways,’ Sasha went on. ‘Either we’ll end up swallowing the country whole and spitting out an Afghan Federated Socialist Republic of the USSR, or we’ll just declare a victory and go home. The trouble is, our friends on the Central Committee don’t see that yet.’
‘They ought to come down here and watch the black-asses play buzkashi,’ Zaytsev observed. Buzkashi was an Afghan version of polo, in which a headless goat was used for the ball. Hostile tribesmen had been known to use a captured live Soviet soldier in place of the goat. ‘Is there a way to make them listen, Sasha?’ he continued. Will the Marshal speak for us?’
‘He might,’ Sasha said thoughtfully. ‘He sees farther than most. He believes in the army more than the Party. I’m in touch with him all the time, even from here.’
‘That’s good. It’s time the army found its voice.’
Sasha considered this for a moment. Then he clapped Zaytsev on the shoulder and said, ‘I think I’ll go and check on Major Mahmoud.’
Zaytsev’s eyes narrowed. ‘I know that bitch. He came along with some of his goons on that raid we made in Shindand district. He deserted under fire, the little prick. I thought for a while that he and his men had gone over to the bandits. When he came crawling back, I wanted to shoot the bitch. Lucky for him one of the commissars showed up.’
‘Well, let’s hope this is something Mahmoud does well.’
He had to make an urgent stop on his way to the headquarters compound, squatting behind a tree like an Afghan. However many of those tablets he took, they were never enough to cement the shit together for more than a couple of hours. It was part of Afghanistan’s revenge on the ferenghi.
Rounding the hill, he caught a whiff of something that he would always associate with the Afghan war, like the stench of carrion: the smell of burning hashish. Down there to his right, partly screened by a boulder, was the Estonian with one of his fellow NCOs. Sasha didn’t interfere with them. They had earned their relaxation. But it alarmed him that the Soviet army had learned so quickly to substitute hashish for vodka. You couldn’t stop the soldiers trading anything they could lay hands on for the drug — kerosene, diesel oi
l, looted Afghan property, even guns and ammunition. For the Soviets in Afghanistan, hashish was becoming what marijuana and heroin had been to the Americans in Vietnam. He wondered how that would fit in with Marshal Zotov’s scheme of things.
He found Major Mahmoud presiding over a camp table, well protected by a squad of his own men in addition to his KGB adviser. ‘Where’s Abdol Qari?’ Sasha asked.
‘He had a weak heart,’ Mahmoud said straight-faced. ‘He died under interrogation.’
Sasha swore under his breath. The KGB adviser offered him a cigarette. ‘We got what we needed from one of the others,’ he said to Sasha in an undertone. ‘We now know their ringleaders in Herat.’
‘Next!’ Major Mahmoud yelled out.
They brought in the old man, and Mahmoud started hurling questions at him. The old vulture stood there, bound and silent. In response to a further question, he gathered up what little saliva he had in his nearly toothless mouth — he had been denied food and drink — and spat in the major’s face. Mahmoud rushed from behind his desk and dealt the Mujahid a terrible blow in the chest with the butt of his pistol.
The old man fell to the dirt floor, his forehead resting on the earth as if he was obeying the call to prayer.
He began to chant. ‘Ashahadu anna la ilala illallah. I testify that there is no God but Allah.’
‘Bala!’ Major Mahmoud screamed at him. ‘Get up!’
Mahmoud had them drag the Mujahid right up to his table. He produced a bayonet and slashed the old man’s bonds. Sasha could see the gouge marks where the rope had cut off the blood supply.
Mahmoud grabbed the guerrilla’s right hand and slammed it down, palm upwards, on top of the camp table.
Holding the sharp edge of the bayonet above the prisoner’s knuckles, Mahmoud repeated his question.
The Mujahid started to chant again. ‘Ashahadu anna la —’
Mahmoud raised the bayonet, and brought it down in a rapid chopping motion. When the prisoner was able to pull his hand away, four bloody fingers were left on the table. No sound had escaped from the old man except his patient, monotonous chant.
‘Ashahadu anna la Mohammed rasulu-llah,’ he recited, capping his left hand over the stumps of his fingers, which were spurting blood. It ran down his arms and streaked the sides of his baggy trousers.
Sasha jumped up and started swearing at Mahmoud. Since he was shouting in Russian, the Afghan affected not to understand, even though Sasha was sure he had been to the KGB school in Tashkent. The KGB adviser took Sasha’s arm to restrain him.
‘We’re just their advisers, remember? This is their country. These are their ways. Do you think the bandits treat their captives any better? S volkamy zjit, po voltchiy vit. If you live with wolves, howl like them.’
‘It’s not necessary!’ Sasha objected.
‘Look at that one.’ The KGB adviser nodded his head at the prisoner. ‘Do you think he can be reeducated?’
The old man was still at his prayers. He looked like someone who would slit your throat for a couple of roubles, but he burned with the bright flame of a religious martyr.
Mahmoud repeated his question as if there had been no interruption.
He listened thoughtfully as the guerrilla declaimed that Mohammed was the messenger of God, as if this could be the answer he was seeking.
Then he jabbed his bayonet half an inch or more into the old man’s flat belly.
This time, the Mujahid groaned aloud, but he went on with his chant. Mahmoud tried him again, with the same results. Finally, Mahmoud wearied of the game, and rammed his bayonet all the way in, up to the hilt.
He wiped the blade clean on the old man’s turban, and two of his guards came up to haul the corpse away.
Major Mahmoud smirked, and Sasha realized he would enjoy seeing that man dead. For a treacherous moment he thought, We’ve got the wrong Afghans. He fought to control his reactions, reminding himself that the old man who had been bled in that room like an animal sacrifice had the blood of Russians on his hands.
He had seen enough of Mahmoud’s interrogation procedures. But as he was leaving, he saw the next prisoner being dragged in. It was the boy he had captured in that stinking hut in the caravanserai. How old was he? Ten at most.
‘Not this one,’ Sasha said to the KGB adviser in a tone that didn’t brook discussion.
The KGB officer entered into a hurried exchange in Dari with Major Mahmoud.
‘There’s time enough, inshallah,’ said the Afghan at the end of it.
‘Listen to me,’ Sasha said to the adviser. ‘I’m going to Herat. When I come back tomorrow morning, I expect to find this one’ — he pointed to the boy — ‘alive.’
‘Don’t worry.’ The KGB man was too accommodating to be plausible.
Sasha felt a pressing need to go to the latrines, but he waited until he had seen the boy prisoner escorted back to the lock-up. The war, like the country, was merciless. He remembered his reactions when he had first set eyes on the sawtooth peaks of the Hindu Kush. This was not a land that forgave human weakness. And he had accepted that from the beginning. Even the Estonian, a throwback to the eleventh-century Assassins with his hash pipe and his collection of human parts, failed to rouse more than mild distaste. So why did he feel so bitter and angry now? He tried to rationalize his emotions, telling himself that the way the war was being waged would only harden the resolve of the Mujahideen and add to their support among the people. Then he recalled the phrase from one of his father’s letters from the front: ‘We have become our enemy.’ Yes, that was the danger: what was happening to the army itself. For a start, sadists like Mahmoud had to be put out of business, not for the sake of ‘bourgeois humanism’ — his father’s supposed crime — but for the honor and discipline of the army. And because violence was only effective when controlled. He had just planned and mounted a highly successful cross-border operation whose rewards would have been even greater if Abdol Qari were still alive, to be used as an intelligence source, or as a defector who could be displayed on television to demoralize his own followers, or, failing all that, as a hostage.
These were some of the elements Sasha intended to include in his report. He would send it from the command post in Herat that same night, together with his account of the Caravan operation. It would be entertaining to see what kind of protest the Iranians had lodged. And there would be decent food and wine in Herat.
It was dusk as Sasha prepared to leave. The drive to Herat should take forty minutes at the outside, but it was late to be leaving alone. Even during the day the Soviets preferred to move about only in the safety of convoys, sometimes preceded by armored cars and mine detectors. At night the guerrillas owned the countryside. Even in major towns, the bazaars were closing earlier and earlier — in some cases at midday — in expectation of savage fighting as the day wore on.
There was a staff car in the compound, a black Volga. Sasha commandeered it.
Zaytsev came running up. ‘Where do you think you’re going? Dinner’s on in the mess.’
‘I’ll eat in Herat,’ Sasha said.
‘Bloody hell. You’re not thinking of going by yourself? Hey, you!’ Zaytsev called out to a couple of men who were walking toward the barracks. ‘Get a jeep and a Dashka. You’ll accompany Colonel Preobrazhensky to Herat.’
Sasha recognized the Estonian and his friend. ‘You certainly picked a fine escort,’ he remarked to Zaytsev. ‘They’re having visions of meeting the houris in paradise.’
The Estonian did, indeed, look a little disoriented when he re-appeared with the jeep.
‘They’ll go first,’ Zaytsev said firmly. ‘I’d rather have those fuck-heads run over a mine than you.’ The guerrillas were cutting up the unexploded bombs that were lying around all over the place and making highly effective mines out of them. They were also getting deliveries of Italian plastique, which was no less lethal.
‘All right, all right.’ Sasha patted Zaytsev’s arm. ‘Anything you want in Herat?’
‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
Night closed like shutters over the twisting road through the hills. The car bucked under Sasha, and he thought the Estonian must be better off in the jeep. But a sore backside was at least better than falling asleep at the wheel, which he might otherwise have done, passively following the taillights ahead of him.
He jerked more fully awake as the jeep ahead veered over to the side of the road. He saw the headlights of a truck approaching them, a big Soviet truck, probably the first of a convoy. He gently depressed the brake pedal, swinging over behind the Estonian.
In the dark of the quarter-moon, he saw only patches of what followed. He heard the driver of the truck honk, as if in greeting, then saw the tarpaulin covering the back of the vehicle yanked up, and a group of men in turbans spurting fire at the jeep. He saw the Estonian, slowed by hashish, hurl himself behind the heavy machine gun, but couldn’t know that the first bullet from the volley fired by the Mujahideen pierced the left ventricle, the atrium, and the aorta of the Estonian’s heart. The jeep lurched off the road, leaving Sasha alone to face the guerrillas in the truck.
He ducked his head into the steering wheel, not fast enough. He felt a scorching pain high up in his chest. His hands fell from the wheel, and the car went spinning off the road. He was coasting close to a cliff, dimly aware of the valley below. The Mujahideen didn’t bother to see whether he was dead or alive. The truck followed him off the road, ramming the side of the black Volga, until it teetered over the cliff.
Sasha was hurled around the car like a squash ball as it rolled over and over down the slope to the very edge of an irrigation canal. The pain subsided into a porous darkness. When he came round, the car was lying on its back like a beetle. He was vaguely aware that he ought to be thankful for the poor quality of Soviet gasoline. Otherwise, the car would certainly have burst into flame. Somehow, he managed to wrench the door open. He fell, rather than crawled, outside. Each time he moved, he felt that somebody was beating him down with a red-hot poker.